When we talk to people in marketing departments, Ecommerce or sales teams at major brands, we always end up hearing the same thing. Their job is getting more complex and it’s not easy to thrive in the brand and retail world due to the ever-increasing amount of distribution channels. Brand managers are suffocating in spreadsheets and their product content is sitting in dusty data silos all over their organizations. Brands are faced with huge product content problems.

[tweet_this] There’s a growing demand for brand product content and the platforms used to manage it are insufficient. [/tweet_this]

When it comes to dealing with brand product content, we always hear the same pain-points. We came up with a list of five major product content problems. If you face these issues in you organization leave us a comment below!

1. Sharing product content is a nightmare

There’s a enormous amount of content that gets passed between brand managers, sales and account teams, retail buyers and marketing departments. Right now, sharing product content is a nightmare. Coworkers need it, agencies sends content, then it gets sent to retailers, back to coworkers, back to the agency, then to regulation and so on and so forth. Brands are stuck doing administrative tasks like emailing images instead on focusing on being strategic.

2. There is no centralized repository for product content

Where does brand product content live? It varies from brand to brand, but some of it sits on local computers, some in SAP or an equivalent, some with agencies, most in Excel, SharePoint, in emails, on Dropbox, you name it. There is no centralized repository, content is scattered across multiple platforms making the right file difficult to source.

3. Version control is hard to handle

With so many people making changes to product content in different systems, inevitably things fall through the cracks. Version control gets thrown out the window with different people ending up with different versions. We often hear from the individuals in the trenches that it feels like an ‘organized state of chaos’.

4. So many people ‘touch’ product content in one organization

We have been told that the average number of people who alter a piece of product content, whether that is adding an image or altering a piece of copy, is six people. At the end of the day, human error is inevitable. People make mistakes, they pass along the wrong image version, they add the misspell the name of the product and so on and so forth.

Not only do brands have to update their own website with content, but they also have to update their retailers, their packaging partners, their agencies, their ecommerce website, 3rd party applications, and the list goes on. The omni-channel consumer expects every channel to offer the same shopper experience. That means they expect product content and brand messaging to remain in sync. Having inconsistent product information across different channels can ultimately hurt your brand reputation and decrease brand loyalty.

Do you face these problems in your organization? Don’t sweat it. This is the reason we built Hubba. We want to be the connector for brands and their business partners. We want to facilitate the sharing of product content. We’re here to help.